AYAZ KADER

In our lives, we track our transactions, work hours, calories, and steps, but an essential component remains untouched: our thoughts and feelings. In the bustle of life, running and commuting from place to place, we sometimes seem absorbed in thoughts about different aspects of our lives, be they sources of problems or merriments. They come and go in harmony with boredom or tiredness, and it occurs subconsciously.

There always seems to be this unfortunate disconnect between your conscious and subconscious. You control the former, but the latter feels spontaneous and sometimes unnerving, too.

To track and make sense of these thoughts and feelings you always get, journaling can be a befitting cathartic outlet. Simply, journaling just means externalising all your day-to-day thoughts so you can preserve and inspect them at your will.

“Thoughts” here can refer to anything from simple things like “I’m tired” to stronger emotions like grief. In your leisure time, you could just sit down and jot them down in a diary or your phone.

A direct and immediate benefit is that writing down your emotions can be an excellent emotional regulation strategy. A study titled “Putting feelings into words: Affect labelling as implicit emotion regulation” has shown externalising your thoughts in this way results in the attenuation of your emotions and can significantly improve mood. In technical terms, this is called “affect labelling”.

But the merits of journaling appear conspicuously in the long term if you regularly put in entries to track your thoughts instead of putting them in every now and then. When a stimulus triggers a negative emotion and bugs you, writing it down can sometimes help you notice patterns. For example, if a certain action triggers your anxiety recurrently, if you write it down, you can later analyse the patterns behind the anxiety and take deliberate steps to deal with the cause.

You may ask, why can’t I think about these in my own mind instead of writing them down, which can get tedious? There are several reasons for this. You can hardly ever “think” about an issue that bothers you and then sort it out. Pondering about negative emotions can just lead to more self-consciousness and biases to cloud your reasoning. As I said in the beginning, there is always this disconnect between your conscious and subconscious.

Recollection of memory in your mind is sometimes spontaneous and selective or dependent on preconceived biases, which can lead to a vicious cycle of cognitive distortions which might dilute your perception of reality. This will lead to more problems than solutions. Your mind is not a book where the facts are laid out for you to peruse and reach conclusions. Your mental faculties may be great at reasoning, but they falter when it comes to remembering information verbatim.

However, your journal exists to make up for this. A journal doesn’t distort reality or garble your memory. It will stay there as you’ve kept it, so you can analyse it later and understand yourself better, and hopefully become a better version of yourself gradually.

Reference:

Sage Journals (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labelling as implicit emotion regulation.

Ayaz is a contributing writer at Campus, Rising Stars, and Star Youth. He is currently studying for his IGCSE. Reach him at ayazkader710@gmail.com